Cost of automation

Today I've got frustrated with sync on Chrome, for some reasons it was not adding new app links that I have created on a different computer. I thought what's the big deal, there should be a sync now button, apparently there is none.  You are forced to rely on automated process to figure out when it's convenient time to sync.
Question which comes to my mind first what if such process fails, what am I going to do. Looks like the only way to force it is to logout and then log back in, keeping your fingers crossed and hoping that it will work.
Next thing which came to my mind was: wait a minute, that's the same company which builds self driven cars.  So I am guessing that those car won't have any manual controls either, and when something fails...  well wish us luck.
Don't get me wrong I am all for automation and innovations, however there is gotta be a fall back to manual mode just in case something went wrong. So at the end of the day I got exactly the same result as I got a year ago - Chrome is not my browser, it is definitely made a huge progress since I've attempted to use it as default one on my computer last time and there is a place for Chrome on my computer for some web applications, however Firefox will remain default browser just because it works.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ethics in software development.

In today's world software is deeply integrated into our lives. It's not avoidable, it's everywhere. It's not just apps, that you run on your smartphone, but all essential services on your smartphone are nothing more than software functions. We use software managed cellular networks. It's in our appliance, even in our car regardless how old it is (unless of course you are roaming in car from 50th). Those systems called embedded and usually well hidden from a regular people. Additionally recent advances in computing powers allowed developers to embed even more complex software systems into ever smaller devices. That in turn brought more AI powered systems into every day use. Many of our devices today has various AI system, that we didn't even notice. For example virtual assistants, which helps to automate routine tasks and let us concentrate on more cognitive tasks. In fact various AI systems heavily embedded into our lives. Facebook's AI algorithm decides wha...
Read more

Preferred way of commnnunication

Image
It's all started few days ago when I overheard a conversation of two guys where one was complaining about how expensive to send and receive SMS messages on his ages old unlimited plan from one of the leading cellular providers and how would it make his life easier if people would use chat app to reach out to him. At that point I thought to my self, he is right, it's all different, we are all different! Why can't I set a preference for each contact in my miles long contact list and when I hit chat it will bring chat app preferred by that person, whether it's SMS or WhatsApp or any other app, and when I hit call once again it will call that person on his/her preferred phone app, whether it's VOIP apps like Viber or just a regular phone app. Those two simple actions could simplify user experience as different users could have a different preferences for communication. Something like this: All of that led to a creation of PreferredWay open source application for ph...
Read more

Bitcoin - consumer's perspective

Working on the front line of IonTec Software LLC is a lot of fun. Some time ago I was helping one of our customers to navigate through industry buzzwords and see if they could improve their business processes by implementing some of the new technologies. One of the technologies in question was a block chain. They were wondering if and how they could implement it to improve their business. All of those conversations reminded me of the Bitcoin and inspired me to write this post, where I'd like to take a look at the Bitcoin(BTC) from consumer's perspective. Let me set some boundaries: I am not going to talk about investing in BTC, because I am not a professional investor and it looks to me like a giant speculation. So you potentially may score a something on short-term deals, if you have a sizable amount of assets to risk with, because, most likely, price will go up as it becomes more and more popular and it will. However at the end of the day, BTC is just a cryptocurrency, so I ...
Read more